I connected with key people from university careers services across Ireland today to ask a simple question:
When your graduates finish a course, how do employers find them?
The answers I keep hearing are remarkably similar: CVs. Job boards. Word of mouth. Maybe a LinkedIn profile if the graduate has thought to set one up. Sometimes a careers fair, if the timing works out.
But here's what struck me. Universities know exactly what skills each graduate has. They assessed them. They graded them. They certified them through rigorous, quality-assured programmes. Every module, every placement, every project — it's all been evaluated and recorded.
And that data? It goes nowhere an employer can search.
The Numbers Tell the Story
82% of employers say they can't find people with the skills they need. That's not a small gap — that's a systemic failure. And it's not because the skilled people don't exist. They do. They're graduating from universities every year, tens of thousands of them, with verified, assessed competencies.
The people exist. The skills are verified. The connection layer is missing.
Think about what that means in practice. A company in Dublin needs a data analyst with Python skills and experience in financial modelling. Three floors up in a university building across the city, a lecturer has just finished assessing exactly those competencies in a class of thirty graduates. Both sides are looking for each other. Neither can find the other efficiently.
Why CVs Aren't the Answer
The CV was designed for a different era. It's a self-reported document with no verification layer. Employers know this — which is why they spend weeks screening, interviewing, and testing candidates to figure out what they can actually do. It's expensive, slow, and unreliable.
Meanwhile, the university has already done that verification. The assessment has already happened. The evidence already exists. It's just locked in a student records system that no employer will ever see.
What I'm Building
That's what EmployAb is — an answer to that question I keep asking careers services. A connection layer that takes the verified skills data universities already produce and makes it searchable by employers.
Not self-reported skills on a profile page. Not keyword-stuffed CVs. Verified credentials that employers can actually search, backed by the institution that assessed them.
Real-time matching. University-managed. Built so that when an employer needs a graduate with specific skills, they can find one — and trust that the skills are real.
This Isn't Just a Technology Problem
The technology matters, of course. But what really matters is changing the flow of information. Right now, verified skills data flows from student to university to... a filing cabinet. EmployAb redirects that flow so it reaches the people who need it most: the employers trying to hire, and the graduates trying to get hired.
Ireland is where we're starting. 89,000 graduates a year. 34 universities and colleges. A government that's actively pushing for better graduate outcomes data. The ingredients are all there — they just need connecting.
That's the connection layer. And that's what we're building.
If you work in university careers services, graduate outcomes, or employer recruitment and want to talk about this — I'd genuinely love to hear your perspective. What's the biggest gap you see between training and employment? Drop me a line at hello@employab.com.